


wi-fi

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-16 07:02:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21266990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: The truth is, we're all just waiting to connect.





	wi-fi

**Author's Note:**

> **written for [run by hozier.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGnXQOHVhBY)**
> 
> i restarted this fic several times and for the sake of time, ended up sticking with this version... i'm still not satisfied but i hope you will find some joy in this TT 
> 
> thank you lovely mods for your patience for holding another round of jukebox!! ♡♡♡

The eve before his twenty-fourth birthday and after an hour-long conversation with his service provider, Wonwoo disconnects his router.

"It's a thing I'm trying," he tells Soonyoung over the phone nonchalantly. Soonyoung meaningfully insinuates that he believes Wonwoo is going _through a phase. Do you need me to come over?,_ to which Wonwoo says, _no thanks._ "Don't you think we spend too much goddamn time on the internet, anyway?"

He stares at the pulled-out wires for a long time. It's the hottest day of the summer so far, and the tiled floor of his kitchen is still startlingly cold even though he's been sitting on it long enough to create indents on the back of his thighs. The distance makes it all look like a piece of a bad sci-fi massacre, pasted into the wrong universe.

"I'm taking control of my life," Wonwoo says, to absolute emptiness. It is very quiet, and dark.

Wonwoo read the Wikipedia page before moving out for his job. Population: ten thousand, distance from the nearest Korean supermarket: thirty-five miles. That sounds further than if Wonwoo wanted to go home to his parent's house and drive past his old high school to the nearby H Mart with the parking lot full of potholes. His mom told him a few years ago that they'd repaved it nice and smooth, and it'd been so bad that Bohyuk could apparently smell it from the soccer practice on the field, but Wonwoo hasn't been.

The thing Wonwoo still can't used to is how empty everything becomes after eight at night. Underage kids have curfew, but the only place that stays open later than that is the bar that served him watered-down alcohol when he went out with his boss once, and even they close at eleven-thirty. Sometimes when Wonwoo lies awake in his bed at one still on his phone, he can hear the sonic boom of a car going two times the speed limit down the road outside his apartment.

That said, twenty-five hours after disconnecting his internet and nineteen into his birthday, Wonwoo's loading groceries into his car when someone who's been sitting on the stairs of the supermarket entrance calls out to him. "Hey!" he says over the sound of Wonwoo slamming the trunk closed. He's wearing a bright smock that cuts through the dimness of the evening, still neon green even in the mulberry tint of dusk. He might've bagged Wonwoo's apples. "Can I show you something?"

Wonwoo squints at him, backlit by the blinding grocery store lights. "What?"

The guy stands up. He grins and bounds down the stairs toward a bald patch in the parking lot, where the pavement's been shattered to let the earth beneath it breathe. "Just watch," he insists, so Wonwoo does.

He taps a ratty-Conversed foot against that spot – not unlike how you'd dip your toes into pool water to test its temperature. Nothing, momentarily, happens. Wonwoo wonders if his TV dinners are thawing in the back of his car.

And then, like a beacon in the dark, a single orchid unfurls its reticent face toward the cobalt sky.

Apparently, this town's just all swamp underneath. Fifty years ago, companies had come in and paved it over with concrete, and the overgrown earth that still remained near the highway roads was all that was left of that.

"But that doesn't explain why you can do..." Wonwoo trails off, attempting to gesticulate with one arm what Junhui had shown him. The other he uses to scratch the mosquito bites littering the back of his legs.

Junhui gives him a toothy grin at that. "Cool, right?" he says. His slightly crooked teeth catch the last yolks of sunset streaming through the parking lot, as if there existed some gravitational pull there.

"Then why didn't my lettuce gain a mind of its own and leap out of your hands while you bagged it?" Wonwoo had asked him the second day. He'd first checked for Junhui's tall back near the registers and then proceeded to pick up an unnecessary amount of on-sale produce to test his theory. Wonwoo didn't even like vegetables.

Junhui had burst into laughter then. "That wouldn't make sense!" he'd told him in between gasping for breath. "Lettuce can't just gain _agency!"_

"Yeah," echoes Wonwoo. Over the past week, he'd gone grocery shopping four times. After lingering by the magazine display and putting his things in his car, he'd join Junhui on the steps as he waited out the end of his shift. "Cool."

The orchid in that patch of earth was flattened by the next time Wonwoo came back, probably run over by some car using the nearby exit. Junhui nudges his shoulder with his own. "You don't have to lie, you know," he teases. He'd been too sad about it to let another bloom in its place.

A car passes by before them, the late-summer air cold now that the sun's gone down. "No," Wonwoo insists, rubbing his palms against the knees of his jeans. It all felt oddly intimate, this moment. At the same time, Wonwoo couldn't find a way to reach out and hold it for warmth in his palms either, and so he opens his mouth again to let the flavor linger on his tongue instead. "I mean it."

Five days. "That's how long I think you'll hold out," Soonyoung had told him two weeks ago, when Wonwoo'd first pulled the plug on his router. He'd also said that if he ended up being right, Wonwoo owed him a two-way ticket to Seoul in time for his winter vacation.

"What was your side of the bet?" Soonyoung asks on the day his defeat is imminent. "Man, I still can't believe you _won."_

Wonwoo feels the smile on his face. "What do you mean? Of course I was gonna win."

Three months. Yujin sat down with him, solemn. "It's like, the more I get to know you," she said as if she were breaking her own heart instead of his, "the more I feel like I'll never really know you."

They were sitting by the river. The first time they'd gone, Yujin brought a stale bagel, tore it into rough pieces, and threw it to the birds. Those same birds swirled above the water as Wonwoo balled his hands into fists in his hoodie pocket.

Yujin cleared her throat. She smiled wistfully and continued, "Thank you for liking someone like me." That was the end, then.

Twenty-four years. "Have you ever felt like you've been waiting for something?" Junhui says, elbows propped on the stair above the one they're sitting on, staring at the sky. He wanted to find the Big Dipper, to which Wonwoo said _I don't think it's dark enough out yet._ "And you've been waiting for so long that you think you should stop, but you've also put in all this time waiting for it – for _this thing_ that it'd be a waste to completely give up?"

Wonwoo shrugs. He rubs at the thighs of his jeans absentmindedly. "You can make flowers sprout from plain dirt," he points out, "what's there for you to wait for?"

"Maybe," Junhui starts. He pauses suddenly, hunching back over and talking through his arms wrapped around his knees. "Maybe I was waiting for you."

Wonwoo only found his tongue a week and a half after Yujin broke up with him. That was the first day he'd moved into his new apartment in this new town that was thirty-five miles away from the nearest Korean supermarket and, with his things still packed into cardboard boxes he hadn't wanted to label, he'd given her number a call.

"You know you can tell me, like, anything," Soonyoung told him once, apropos of nothing, while they were walking to class. "I'm serious."

Wonwoo looked at him, thinking about that. "Okay," he finally replied.

Soonyoung gave him a quick, pressed-together smile. "Okay," he repeated.

It was funny. You could know all the language in the world and not have the words to put your thoughts into. Likewise, you could have all the words to put your thoughts into and not have anyone there to listen to them. Or, you could have someone willing to listen only to find you didn't actually want to say anything to anyone, at all.

Wonwoo reached the dial tone. It was deafening in the otherwise absolute silence. _You've been disconnected._

So:

"Were you?" says Wonwoo. He looks over at Junhui, who looks over at him. He inhales sharply and holds his breath.

Junhui smiles at him easily. He did things like that too, said things like that so earnestly that Wonwoo couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

"Yeah," he replies. Sometimes, Wonwoo thought about Junhui running alongside that stretch of overgrown earth parallel to the highway road. He imagined that Junhui would always turn around at some point, waiting for Wonwoo to catch up with him.

There'd be a trail of flowers in the wake of every step he'd taken. Wonwoo feels his lungs burning from exertion, then. "I really was," Junhui tells him so, so kindly.

And – right by his feet as he called Wonwoo's name – a single orchid would unfurl its reticent face, upward toward a summer sky.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/bewearer) // [cc](https://curiouscat.me/715creeks) (｡･･｡)


End file.
